“The thing that truly amazes me about myself is that I’m actually more scared of being embarrassed than anything else.”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“Deborah felt his erection against her stomach and smiled up at him. She grabbed hold of his bum and moved him gently from side to side so that it rocked against her, twitching like Frankenstein's monster in an electric storm.”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“If it’s a choice between being shat on and pissed on and used and being a bastard, I’ll choose being a bastard any time.”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“Sex is . . . well, it’s so rude, isn’t it? You wouldn’t think girls would like sex. You’d think it’s too rude for them. Doing sex with a girl, it’s a bit like putting a frog down their backs or scaring them with dead mice or throwing worms at them. They’re such sensible, grown-up sorts of people. And yet apparently even the nice ones like you sticking the rudest thing you have on your whole body up the exact, rudest part of their body that they have. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me!”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“The fact is, I can’t put together the sort of feelings that I get when I’m having a dirty big wank together with the kind of feelings I get when I’m having a nice friendly chat with someone. It just doesn’t work.”
― Melvin Burgess, quote from Doing It
“A hybrid approach led to eBay's success, but it also created tensions. People are willing to trust one another when it comes to user ratings, but in other situations they want the safeguards that are possible only with a command-and-control structure.”
― Ori Brafman, quote from The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
“This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Transparent Things
“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles. The real arena is corrupt and bloody. Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, quote from Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
“..I always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.”
― Josephine Hart, quote from Damage
“Love! love!.. thou art never to be reconciled with discretion!”
― Antoine François Prévost, quote from Manon Lescaut
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.